Pocket Rigger

Pocket Rigger began as a conversation in 2006 with my brother Steve Shaw — a career rigger and the founder of Levitation Productions Inc. Steve had an idea: a load monitoring system built around durable shackle load cells, tracking rigging loads in real time over Bluetooth. To make that useful on site, riggers needed a fast way to work out leg tensions and lengths on the spot — not back at a desk with a calculator and a notepad.

That calculator became the first version of Pocket Rigger, running on Windows Mobile — PDAs and the Windows Mobile phones of the era. Steve always wanted it on iOS too, but the development tools and Bluetooth support of the time made that a much harder problem than it is today.

Pocket Rigger doesn't talk to those load cells — that's a separate, more specialized piece of hardware — but the tension-and-length calculator that started it all is still exactly what the app is for: fast, accurate math for two- and three-leg bridle hangs. With .NET MAUI, it finally made it to iOS as well as Android. Along the way it's grown a bit past the original idea too — attach a PDF show plot to a Show and share it with the rest of your crew.

Drop Zone started as a breakfast tradition with my son Brad. When he was in elementary school, we used to play Connect 4 most mornings before school — and Brad, being a kid, played to win by any means necessary. Humming an annoyingly catchy tune to throw me off, quietly nudging a piece with his finger when he thought I wasn't looking, resetting the board entirely if a game wasn't going his way — nothing was off-limits.

Drop Zone: Beat Brad is a tribute to those mornings. The core game is the Connect Four we actually played; Chaos Mode — where full columns drop and full rows vanish mid-game — is my way of turning "Brad rearranging the board the second I looked away" into an actual game mechanic. Every time I load it up, it brings back a good memory.

Jackpot: Shut the Box comes from a couple of years spent living and working in Malaysia, from 2009 to 2010. Phuket, Thailand became a favorite quick getaway, and one of the reasons was a game I kept finding at the beachside tiki bars there — locals just called it Jackpot. I spent more evenings than I can count playing it on the beach with a cold Singha in hand, watching the sun go down over the water. That sunset is the actual background photo in the app.

Phuket had a lot to love beyond the game — deep-sea fishing for tuna and blue marlin (I landed one marlin, a genuine bucket-list catch), the huge Big Buddha that was still under construction at the top of the mountain at the time, riding an elephant, and a zoo where you could sit right next to — and pet — a full-grown tiger. Jackpot: Shut the Box is a small piece of that time and place, brought back.

Getting a closed-testing track past Google's minimum tester requirement is its own small hurdle before an app can even reach production — and finding people willing to actually install a beta, use it, and give real feedback isn't much easier. Pocket Beta is a marketplace that solves both sides of that at once: developers register an app and get matched with testers; testers earn credits by testing apps, then spend those credits to get their own app tested in return.

Have an app that needs testers? Register it, tell Pocket Beta how many testers you need, and the marketplace recruits them for you — a 14-day window, screenshot verification, and a dashboard tracking who's active the whole way through.

Just want to test apps? No app of your own required — join campaigns, try real apps before anyone else, and earn credits for every one you complete. Redeem them later if you ever register an app yourself, or just keep testing.